The Affirmation Read online

  The Affirmation

  CHRISTOPHER PRIEST

  In praise of Christopher Priest’s previous novel, A Dream of Wessex, John Fowles wrote: ‘I can best convey its quality by saying that I think not only H. G. Wells but Hardy himself…would have enjoyed and approved of it.’ Other reviewers called it ‘a fine, exciting novel’, ‘brilliant and utterly absorbing’ and ‘a work of fiction of the highest quality’. The Affirmation—a story of madness—surpasses even the finest of Priest’s earlier work.

  Peter Sinclair is 29 years old. His father has just died, he has lost his job and his apartment, his mistress has left him. He arranges to stay temporarily in the country cottage of a family friend. There he begins work on an autobiographical manuscript, one with which he intends simply to recount the story of his life, but one which soon develops into an act of imaginative reconstruction, a statement of metaphorical identity. Fascinated, the reader watches as Peter drifts between the increasingly shadowy world of outer reality, and the plausible inner world of memory and imagination.

  Christopher Priest is at the height of his powers in this brilliant novel, an engrossing story that will hold you spellbound from beginning to end.

  Also by the author

  INDOCTRINAIRE

  FUGUE FOR A DARKENING ISLAND

  INVERTED WORLD

  THE SPACE MACHINE

  A DREAM OF WESSEX

  THE PERFECT LOVER

  ANTICIPATIONS (ED.)

  AN INFINITE SUMMER

  First published in 1981

  by Faber and Faber Limited

  3 Queen Square London WC1

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  Redwood Burn Ltd, Trowbridge and Esher

  All rights reserved

  © Christopher Priest, 1981

  ISBN 0 571 11684 1

  The extract from “Sailing to Byzantium” from

  Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats is reprinted

  with the permission of M.B. Yeats, Anne Yeats

  and Macmillan London Limited

  To M.L. and L.M.

  O sages standing in God’s holy fire

  As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

  Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

  And be the singing-masters of my soul.

  Consume my heart away; sick with desire

  And fastened to a dying animal

  It knows not what it is; and gather me

  Into the artifice of eternity.

  Once out of nature I shall never take

  My bodily form from any natural thing,

  But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

  Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

  To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

  Or set upon a golden bough to sing

  To lords and ladies of Byzantium

  Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

  W. B. YEATS

  “Sailing to Byzantium”

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  1

  This much I know for sure:

  My name is Peter Sinclair, I am English and I am, or I was, twenty-nine years old. Already there is an uncertainty, and my sureness recedes. Age is a variable; I am no longer twenty-nine.

  I once thought that the emphatic nature of words ensured truth. If I could find the right words, then with the proper will I could by assertion write all that was true. I have since learned that words are only as valid as the mind that chooses them, so that of essence all prose is a form of deception. To choose too carefully is to become pedantic, closing the imagination to wider visions, yet to err the other way is to invite anarchy into one’s mind. If I am to reveal myself then I prefer to do so by my choices, rather than by my accidents. Some might say that such accidents are the product of the unconscious mind, and thus inherently interesting, but as I write this I am warned by what is to follow. Much is unclear. At this outset I need that tedious quality of pedanticism. I have to choose my words with care. I want to be sure.

  Therefore, I shall begin again. In the summer of 1976, the year Edwin Miller lent me his cottage, I was twenty-nine years old.

  I can be as certain of this as I am of my name, because they are both from independent sources. One is the gift of parents, the other the product of the calendar. Neither can be disputed.

  In the spring of that year, while still twenty-eight, I came to a turning-point in my life. It amounted to a run of bad luck, caused by a number of external events over which I had little or no control. These misfortunes were all independent of each other, yet because they all came together in the space of a few weeks it seemed as if they were part of some terrible conspiracy against me.

  In the first place, my father died. It was an unexpected and premature death, of an undetected cerebral aneurysm. I had a good relationship with him, simultaneously intimate and distant; after the death of our mother some twelve years earlier, my sister Felicity and I had been united with him at an age when most adolescents are resisting their parents. Within two or three years, partly because I went away to university, and partly because Felicity and I became alienated from each other, this closeness had been broken. The three of us had for several years lived in different parts of the country, and were together only rarely. Even so, the memories of that short period in my teens lent an unspoken bond between my father and me, and we both valued it.

  He died solvent but not rich. He also died intestate, which meant that I had to be involved in a number of tedious meetings with his solicitor. At the end of it all, Felicity and I each received half of his money. It was not large enough to make much difference to either of us, but in my case it was sufficient to cushion me from some of what followed.

  Because, in the second place, following a few days after the news of my father’s death, I heard that I was soon to be made redundant.

  It was a time of recession in the country, with inflating prices, strikes, unemployment, a shortage of capital. Smugly, with my middle-class confidence, I had assumed my degree would insure me against any of this. I worked as a formulation chemist for a flavour house, supplying a large pharmaceutical company, but there was an amalgamation with another group, a change of policy, and my firm had to close my department. Again, I assumed that finding another job would be a mere technicality. I had qualifications and experience, and I was prepared to be adaptable, but many other science graduates were made redundant at the same time and few jobs were available.

  Then I was served notice to quit my flat. Government legislation, by marginally protecting the tenant at the expense of the landlord, had disrupted the forces of supply and demand. Rather than rent property, it was becoming more advantageous to buy and sell. In my case, I rented an apartment on the first floor of a large old house in Kilburn, and had lived there for several years. The house was sold to a property company, though, and almost at once I was told to get out. There were appeal procedures, and I embarked on them, but with my other worries at the time I did not act promptly or effectively enough. It was soon clear I should have to vacate. But where in London could one move to? My own case was far from untypical, and more and more people were hunting for flats
in an ever-shrinking market. Rents were going up quickly. People who had security of tenure stayed put, or, if they moved, transferred the tenancy to friends. I did what I could: I registered with agencies, answered advertisements, asked my friends to let me know if they heard of a place coming free, but in all the time I was under notice to quit I never even got so far as to look at any places, let alone find somewhere suitable.

  It was in this context of circumstantial disaster that Gracia and I fell out. This, alone of all my problems, was one in which I played a part, for which I bore some responsibility.

  I was in love with Gracia, and she, I believe, with me. We had known each other a long time, and had passed through all the stages of novelty, acceptance, deepening passion, temporary disillusionment, rediscovery, habit. She was sexually irresistible to me. We could be good company to each other, complement our moods, yet still retain sufficient differences from each other to be surprising.

  In this was our downfall. Gracia and I aroused non-sexual passions in each other that neither of us had ever experienced with anyone else. I was normally placid, yet when I was with her I was capable of degrees of anger and love and bitterness that always shocked me, so powerful were they. Everything was heightened with Gracia, everything assumed an immediacy or importance that created havoc. She was mercurial, able to change her mind or her mood with infuriating ease, and she was cluttered with neuroses and phobias which at first I found endearing, but which the longer I knew her only obstructed everything else. Because of them she was at once predatory and vulnerable, capable of wounding and being wounded in equal measure, although at different times. I never learned how to be with her.

  The rows, when we had them, came suddenly and violently. I was always taken unawares, yet once they had started I realized that the tensions had been building up for days. Usually the rows cleared the air, and we would make up with a renewed closeness, or with sex. Gracia’s temperament allowed her to forgive quickly or not at all. In every case but one she forgave quickly, and the one time she did not was of course the last. It was an awful, squalid row, on a street corner in London, with people walking past us trying not to stare or listen, with Gracia screaming and swearing at me, and I stricken with an impenetrable coldness, violently angry inside but iron-clad outside. After I left her I went home and was sick. I tried to ring her, but she was never there; I could not get to her. It happened while I was job-hunting, flat-hunting, trying to adjust to the death of my father.

  Those, then, were the facts, insofar as my choice of words can describe them.

  How I reacted to all this is another matter. Nearly everyone has to suffer the loss of a parent at some point in life, new jobs and flats can be found in time, and the unhappiness that follows the end of a love-affair eventually goes away, or is replaced by the excitement of meeting another person. But for me all these came at once; I felt like a man who had been knocked down, then trodden on before he could get up. I was demoralized, bruised and miserable, obsessed with the accumulating unfairness of life and the crushing mess of London. I focused much of my distemper on London: I noticed only its bad qualities. The noise, the dirt, the crowds, the expensive public transport, the inefficient service in shops and restaurants, the delays and muddles: all these seemed to me symptomatic of the random factors that had disrupted my life. I was tired of London, tired of being myself and living in it. But there was no hope in such a response, because I was becoming inward-looking, passive and self-destructive.

  Then, a fortunate accident. Through having to sort out my father’s papers and letters, I came in contact again with Edwin Miller.

  Edwin was a family friend, but I had not seen him for years. My last memory, in fact, was of him and his wife visiting the house while I was still at school. I must then have been thirteen or fourteen. Impressions from childhood are unreliable: I remembered Edwin, and other adult friends of my parents, with an uncritical sense of liking, but this was second-hand from my parents, I had no opinions of my own. A combination of school work, adolescent rivalries and passions, glandular discoveries, and everything else of that age, must have been making a more immediate impression on me.

  It was refreshing to meet him from the vantage of my own adulthood. He turned out to be in his early sixties, suntanned, wiry, full of an unassumed friendliness. We had dinner together at his hotel on the edge of Bloomsbury. It was still early spring, and the tourist season had barely begun, but Edwin and I were like an island of Englishness in the restaurant. I remember a group of German businessmen at a table near ours, some Japanese, some people from the Middle East; even the waitresses who brought us our portions of roast topside beef were Malaysian or Filipino. All this was emphasized by Edwin’s bluff, provincial accent, reminding me irresistibly of my childhood in the suburbs of Manchester. I had grown used to the increasingly cosmopolitan nature of shops and restaurants in London, but it was Edwin who somehow underlined it, made it seem unnatural. I was aware all through the meal of a distracting nostalgia for a time when life had been simpler. It had been narrower, too, and the vague memories were a distraction because not all of them were pleasant. Edwin was a kind of symbol of that past, and for the first half-hour, while we were still exchanging pleasantries, I saw him as representing the background I had happily escaped when I first moved back to London.

  Yet I liked him too. He was nervous of me—perhaps I also represented some kind of symbol to him—and compensated for this by too much generosity about how well I had been doing. He seemed to know a lot about me, at least on a superficial level, and I presumed he had got all this from my father. In the end his lack of guile made me own up, and I told him frankly what had happened to my job. This led inevitably to my telling him most of the rest.

  “It happened to me too, Peter,” he said. “A long time ago, just after the war. You’d have thought there were a lot of jobs around then, but the lads were coming back from the Forces, and we had some bad winters.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I must have been about your age then. You’re never too old for a fresh start. I was on the dole for a bit, then got a job with your dad. That’s how we met, you know.”

  I didn’t know. Another residue of childhood: I assumed, as I had always assumed, that parents and their friends never actually met but had somehow always known one another.

  Edwin reminded me of my father. Although physically unalike they were about the same age, and shared some interests. The similarities were mostly my creation, perceived from within. It was perhaps the flat northern accent, the intonation of sentences, the manneristic pragmatism of an industrial life.

  He was just as I remembered him, but this was impossible. We were both fifteen years older, and he must have been in his late forties when I last saw him. His hair was grey, and thin on the crown; his neck and eyes were heavily wrinkled; there was a stiffness in his right arm, which he remarked on once or twice. He could not possibly have looked like this before, yet sitting there in the hotel restaurant with him I was reassured by the familiarity of his appearance.

  I thought of other people I had met again after a period of time. There was always the first surprise, an internal jolt; he has changed, she looks older. Then, within a few seconds, the perception changes and all that can be seen are the similarities. The mind adjusts, the eye allows; the ageing process, the differences of clothes and hair and possessions, are edited out by the will to detect continuity. Memory is mistrusted in the recognition of more important identifications. Body-weight might differ, but a person’s height or bone-structure do not. Soon it is as if nothing at all has altered. The mind erases backwards, re-creating what one remembers.

  I knew Edwin ran his own business. After a few years working for my father he had set up on his own. At first he had taken on general engineering jobs, but eventually set up a factory that specialized in mechanical valves. These days his principal customer was the Ministry of Defence, and he supplied hydraulic valves to the Royal Navy. He had intended to retire
at sixty, but the business was prospering and he enjoyed his work. It occupied the major part of his life.

  “I’ve bought a little cottage in Herefordshire, near the Welsh border. Nothing special, but just right for Marge and me. We were going to retire down there last year, but the place needs a lot of doing up. It’s still empty.”

  “How much work is there to do?” I said.

  “Mostly redecorating. The place hasn’t been lived in for a couple of years. It needs rewiring, but that can wait. And the plumbing’s a bit antiquated, you could say.”

  “Would you like me to make a start on it? I’m not sure I could take on the plumbing, but I’d have a go at the rest.”

  It was an idea that was sudden and attractive. An escape from my problems had presented itself. In my recently acquired hatred of London, the countryside had assumed a wistful, romantic presence in my mind. Talking about Edwin’s cottage, that dream took on a concrete shape, and I became certain that if I stayed in London I would only sink further into the helplessness of self-pity. Everything became plausible to me, and I tried to talk Edwin into renting me his cottage.

  “I’ll lend it to you free, lad,” Edwin said. “You can have it as long as you need it. Provided, of course, you do a spot of decorating, and when Marge and me decide it’s time to give it all up, then you’ll have to look for somewhere else to go.”

  “It’ll be for just a few months. Long enough to get myself back on my feet.”

  “We’ll see.”

  We discussed a few details, but the arrangement was finalized in a matter of minutes. I could move down there as soon as I liked; Edwin would mail me the keys. The village of Weobley was less than half a mile away, the garden would have to be looked at, it was a long way to the nearest mainline railway station, they wanted white paint downstairs and Marge had her own ideas about the bedrooms, the phone was disconnected but there was a call-box in the village, the septic tank would have to be emptied and perhaps cleaned out.